faith informs life

On Saturday, Representative John Lewis, one of the heroes of the civil rights movement, made the comparison himself. Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, took the McCain-Palin campaign severely to task for “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.” He said: “George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on a Sunday morning (in 1963) when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

The climate of hatred claimed many other victims as well. Most famous among them was Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed in April, 1968. Two months later the victim was Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of the assassinated president, who was himself running for president. A Kennedy biographer, Thurston Clarke, wrote this week that Robert Kennedy was “demonized before he was assassinated.” Clarke reminds us that a leading newspaper editor had called Kennedy “the most vicious and dangerous leader in the United States today.”

Worse, a newspaper columnist and self-proclaimed bigot, Westbrook Pegler, had expressed the wish that “some white patriot … will spatter (Kennedy’s) spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies” — an outright incitement to murder. In the end, of course, it was a disaffected Palestinian who killed Kennedy.

Sarah Palin has suggested no such thing as murder. She would no doubt be horrified at the thought. Yet it is a measure of her blithe ignorance — and of the tin ear of her speech writers — that her acceptance address at the Republican National Convention quoted Westbrook Pegler’s famous line: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” The sentence sounds harmless until you consider that, in the context of a nearly all-white Republican convention, the words will be understood, even if subliminally, as an attack on America’s cities, many of them dominated by black political leaders.

The fact that Palin could throw out even an anodyne quote from someone as discredited as Pegler (she called him simply “a writer,” as if no one would check) is another sign of her naivete at a time when America has finally broken with its painful history and nominated a black man for president. How inflammatory can her careless rhetoric be? Thurston Clarke raised the question: “Has Sarah Palin Put a Target on Obama?”

God forbid. And cut it out with the cheap shots, Sarah. An atmosphere of character assassination and cultural clash helps no one. In Governor Wallace’s case, the bitter whirlwind turned, finally, against him, too. In May, 1972, while running for president, Wallace was gunned down in an assassination attempt that left him in a wheelchair until his death in 1998. (from DerSpeigel)